Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday July 17, 2011 @09:08AM
from the geeting-in-on-the-game dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google has reportedly banned a handful of Anonymous members from Google+ (it's not exactly clear how many accounts were shut down). The hacktivist group likened Google's actions to the stories of activists being banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, as well as governments blocking various websites using Internet censorship tools. As a result, Anonymous has decided to create its own social network: Anonplus."

While what you say about IP addresses being included in every packet is true, it's possible to mask your identity by going through proxies. If I, for example, use TOR, my connection can be routed all over the world before reaching my final destination; this makes it at the very least impractical, and most of the time outright impossible, to trace the origin. Anonymity is possible on the internet if you have the right tools and the intelligence to use them properly.

Leakage between the exit node and destination host doesn't matter at all if you don't reveal any identifying information over the TOR connection. Which you obviously shouldn't, since it defeats the purpouse.

I'd guess the staff reaction at Google was something like, "You've got to be kidding me, right? Do they understand that we're a business that's required to respond to gov inquiries surrounding illegal activity?"

Honestly it's probably better for both Google and those Anon's that goog closed the accounts. The only people that should be disappointed are investigative authorities. Because otherwise, it was only going to end badly.

Why? It's very efficient; they only need one account for everyone. This means they don't need to implement any sort of personal profiles, authentication, relationships or inter-account messaging. Just one single wall everyone can write to.

While you're at rolling about conspiracy theory, why not make it a double-false flag op? Set up by the "real" anons to trick the FBI into hunting the poor idiots that register there so they keep both groups, the feds and the wannabes, occupied?

Or is that triplicity? Either way, I'm stumped by this. I find it hard to believe the FBI would actually expect Anonymous to fall for such an obvious honeypot, and only slightly easier to believe Anon would expect the same of the G-men. Seems like a fishing (or phishing) expedition by someone, hoping to snag something useful. All I know for sure is I'm not going to register an account there.

At the time of writing, the forum already had over 100 registered members.

... and of the 100, 89 of them were CIA, 9 FBI, and 2 Interpol.

Your numbers are all wrong. The CIA doesn't give a shit about groups like this. The real count was 50 for NSA 49 for FBI and 2 for Interpol. Come to think of it you may want to throw a man or two in from Air Force "cyber" intelligence as we all know Anonymous is a threat to the US government's "cyber" infrestructure. The real threat of course is state sponsored hacking with China being the prime suspect.

Nonetheless current social networks are built on a centralized topology, requiring all views and change requests to go through a central location. This is a weakness both from a civil rights perspective and a reliability perspective. A decentralized social network would be awesome. Usenet was pretty much this way, wasn't it? I thought Diaspora could work like this as well.

They basically need a distributed network, so that they can't be blocked by DNS, etc. : with proven good security, and the ability to not need real names.So why not fix the bugs, missing features in Diaspora, etc. instead?

Absolutely the last thing you need is your own high-profile network. Thats just flagging activities you don't want to be flagged.You want instead a distributed network where dissidents, etc. can just use it without being spotted (lost in the crowd), withsecure communications, and th

Isn't an anonymous social network just what we've been calling for? If we can overcome the privacy issues and still have it useful then this could be great. I don't see how google can kick anonymous off their network.

The issue is that it would be created and maintained by anonymous and we have no way of guaranteeing that it isn't the same anonymous that's been releasing account information of random people without redaction. On top of that we have no way of knowing if they're securing the information rather than just hoarding it for a future release.

All in all, Anonymous can get my info, I'm pretty sure of that, but I'm not going to hand it over directly. That would be pretty dumb and quite frankly anybody that bites on this is probably an informant or agent of some sort. Well, or so stupid that they deserve to be compromised.

However, they have a policy that you have to use your real name when signing up for Google+.

No, they don't, this is rumor that keeps getting repeated, here is the G+ name policy [google.com].

They require you use the name you "commonly go by". "If you use your full name", they suggest it'll help people find you, but really the point is to provide what people would type in the search box to find you.

Anonymous stays anonymous to avoid getting caught. They use nicknames or handles and not real names. A social network would defeat their purpose unless it is a fake one to capture IP addresses and passwords to hack more sites. It makes as much common sense as fighting cockroaches with Viagra. Most likely this Anonplus was created for the lulz and will fold faster than Google Wave did!:)

What next telnet BBSes and ASCII Art? No SSH pure telnet unencrypted Systems?:)

I doubt it's anything that well-thought-through. Remember that while there are a lot of real hackers and such that call themselves a part of "Anonymous", a lot of 15-year-olds who think image macros are the height of hilarity do too.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a bunch of them using their real information on there, even.

Your ass. George Bush, about ten congresses, and Barrack Obama have thrown that word around, til it's almost meaningless. Throw in all the cops and activist groups who define a misbehaving child as being "terroristic", and the word has lost all value. Some punk kid tells another punk, "I'm gonna tear your head off, and piss down the hole under it!" he is immediately branded a terrorist.

FFS, dicking around with electronic records does NOT constitute terrorism.

A terrorist is someone who attempts to force some form of change in public opinion/behavior by means of random violence.

Many terrorists consider themselves "freedom fighters", but they really aren't. If you're fighting for "freedom" then you restrict yourself to legitimate military targets, and you don't kidnap and ransom people.

Terrorists use the populace as human shields, deliberately hide their weapons and identities, deliberately target civilians, and are just generally subhuman scum.

If you're fighting for "freedom" then you restrict yourself to legitimate military targets

Once you strip back the national mythology, many supposedly admirable revolutions in history had the underdogs going after targets with only a tangential connection to the military. Much recent scholarship on the American Revolution, for example, has focused on how the revolutionaries terrorized those they considered Loyalists. Homes were burned down and innocent people were hanged simply for being insufficiently enthusiastic about independence from Britain.

Perhaps there is a line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter", but it's awfully hard to draw without losing a rosy view of one's own country's history.

Much recent scholarship on the American Revolution, for example, has focused on how the revolutionaries terrorized those they considered Loyalists.

The fact that it's "recent" is revealing in and of itself; it's a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east.

Homes were burned down and innocent people were hanged simply for being insufficiently enthusiastic about independence from Britain.

Which homes? How many? Why, in particular was each of those homes targeted? Was it a matter of policy, or an occasional slip?

These questions matter. If you're not asking them, you don't care about the truth; you're using the pretense of knowledge to cover your ideology.

The fact that it's "recent" is revealing in and of itself; it's a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east.

By "recent", I mean after the formation of the American national mythology, and that means works of history from long before America's problems with the Middle East. It's hard to call a 1940s historian's recounting of the burning of Loyalist homes (one Wikipedia citation for the event) as "a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east."

It's tiresome that any attempt to show the full picture of early American history is attacked as sympathy with America's enemies.

Which homes? How many? Why, in particular was each of those homes targeted? Was it a matter of policy, or an occasional slip?

A matter of policy. Look to the tarring and feathering activities of the Sons of Liberty. Many of the men who supported these actions were later Founding Fathers. The Committees of Safety that superseded the Sons of Liberty were even worse.

By "recent", I mean after the formation of the American national mythology, and that means works of history from long before America's problems with the Middle East. It's hard to call a 1940s historian's recounting of the burning of Loyalist homes (one Wikipedia citation for the event) as "a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east."

Fair enough - I figured you were referring to the more recent trend of pointing out such incidents any time someone uses the word "terrorism". You know, the way you just did.

It's tiresome that any attempt to show the full picture of early American history is attacked as sympathy with America's enemies.

It is tiresome that any attempt to criticize Americas enemies is immediately met with excuses and attempts to draw moral equivalence. This conversation wasn't about "early American history".

A matter of policy.

Citation?

Look to the tarring and feathering activities of the Sons of Liberty.

So you're comparing tarring and feathering to suicide bombings of mosques and markets?

Erm... none of the Founding Fathers were Catholic. They were mostly Deists and Non-Anglican Protestants, who had left Britain specifically because the Anglican Church were being a bunch of dicks about allowing people to worship (or not) as they chose to.

Yes, I'm sure the founders had very high ideals of liberty and freedom for the natives of the land they occupied

Nobody, anywhere, gave a shit about the natives. They weren't considered "civilized", and they were barely considered human. The only reason you criticize their actions today is because of the change in attitudes which occurred in the intervening centuries. I don't see the point. It's quite possible that our descendants will one day call us a bunch of brutal assholes because we kill those cute little moo-cows, but their judgment of us will be every bit as ignorant as your judgement of our ancestors. Co

There was really nothing else to be said. You're clearly not speaking for me, or for anyone I know. Since you used the word "we", I drew the logical conclusion. I'm not sure where the "effort" is supposed to come in.

I don't know any rational person anywhere in the country that lives in fear of being mugged.

I know a few idiots that much like you are too stupid to realize that the 'news' isn't reality. Interestingly, you live in a country where (I've been there, have you been here?) where women live in constant fear simply because the men believe they are superior to women and that women are basically there to serve men.

I might be safe in your country, my wife on the other hand is liable to be stoned for making the wron

The fact that it's "recent" is revealing in and of itself; it's a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east.

It's more than that. There's a line of revisionism which states basically that not only were the US revolutionaries terrorists, but that their complaints against Britain ranged from unfounded to trivial, that the colonists were actually being coddled compared to those back at home, and that the wh

The fact that it's "recent" is revealing in and of itself; it's a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east.

Convenient: if the facts don't fit your biases, dismiss the people presenting the facts as biased and move on. It helps if you throw in some outrageous hyperbole, too. (In reality, show me anyone who is trying to draw the moral equivalence you suggest, and I'll show you someone who is regarded by any serious historian as a loon.) Meanwhile, back in the real world, the fact that many of the American Revolutionaries were, in fact, by modern standards, out-and-out terrorists is something that's been known for decades.

Which homes? How many? Why, in particular was each of those homes targeted? Was it a matter of policy, or an occasional slip?

These questions matter. If you're not asking them, you don't care about the truth; you're using the pretense of knowledge to cover your ideology.

Indeed they do; and if you actually care about the answers, you'll do some research. And if you do that, you'll quickly learn that GPP's point is entirely correct: no matter how noble their cause, every revolutionary group in history, including those of the years leading up to 1776, has done things that we'd label terrorism (IIRC, a word that came out of the French Revolution) by modern standards. So have the governments they were fighting, of course. Revolutions are ugly, ugly things, inevitably turning families and friends and neighbors against each other, and even of the best of them quickly descend into horror. This is something that those who casually call for revolution against the modern US government should keep in mind.

Perhaps there is a line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter", but it's awfully hard to draw without losing a rosy view of one's own country's history.

True. When Menachem Begin (prime minister of Israel) met Anwar Sadat (premier of Egypt), he greeted him as a "fellow terrorist". Both were hard-line military types. They put together the deal that has kept Israel and Egypt from fighting for almost 40 years now.

By your definition the U.S. government can be labelled a terrorist organization. There's plenty of documented cases where they haven't restricted themselves to military targets and have kidnapped people.

The point of the gp (IMO) is not that terrorists don't do these things, but that every 'legitimate' military force on earth does them too. For example, the US has been making drone strikes in pakistan that target civilian populations in the HOPE of MAYBE getting a terrorist too.

There is a big difference in striking an area that may contain civilians, because a military target is present as well, and sending someone in to blow up a pizza shop full of innocent civilians just trying to get lunch.

Many terrorists consider themselves "freedom fighters", but they really aren't. If you're fighting for "freedom" then you restrict yourself to legitimate military targets, and you don't kidnap and ransom people.

I don't think there's anything in the term "freedom fighter" which justifies these restrictions. You are simply trying to keep people you don't like from using a title with positive associations. People can be ruthless bastards and still desire freedom.

Not always. Most people consider the Taliban to be terrorists, because they use suicide bombings and random shootings to kill Muslims whom they view as insufficiently devout. A while back (before the Pakistani military pushed them out) they outlawed things like dancing or women going out in public. If someone violated those rules, their names would get announced on the radio that night, and they would have maybe twelve hours to get the hell out of dodge, or else their organs would be decorating the town

No, a terrorist is someone who TERRORISES through acts or threats of violence against CIVILIAN targets to achieve political change. If someone plants a command detonated mine and uses it to blow up a military convoy that is a legitimate act of war. If they use the same mine to blow up a school bus full of kids that is an act of terrorism.

The definition IS CLEAR and HAS BEEN CLEAR since it came about. The "terrorist is a freedom fighter who isn't on your side" is bullshit propagated by people who support vio

I would disagree, and say that "acts of terror" is pretty much a meaningless phrase anyways.

Sure you have "terrorists" killing civilians in a meaningless or near meaningless manner, but the US military does that on a even larger scale and throw in all the torture and it is pretty easy to see which side are the bad guys and who is actually engaged in the the worst acts of terror.

terror is used by everyone to wage war, keep the peace, or just get noticed. It is even a huge part of our judicial system (that is

Six police from Houston's anti-gang task raid the home of Pedro Oregon Navarro. Officers storm his bedroom, where Navarro awakes, startled and frightened, and reaches for his gun. Police open fire and shoot Navarro twelve times, killing him. His gun was never fired. Police found no drugs or evidence of drug use or sale in Navarro's home.

Public key cryptography, of course. To 'friend' someone, you generate a keypair and give them the public key and your user id. They do the same. Wall posts, comments, etc., are encrypted with a symmetric cipher (with a random single-use key), and the symmetric key is encrypted with the public key of each person who you want to make the message available to. Of course, you are vulnerable to an evil friend publishing your posts, but that is an unsolvable problem (see: DRM). In place of stateful authentication, each post is signed with a private key whose counterpart is held by the server.

Do all the crypto client-side (perhaps javascript, or alternate integrated clients, like gwibber and smartphone facebook apps) and all the server has to do is hold the encrypted content and validate signatures. You could even make a generalized protocol out of it, so that the content doesn't have to be on any particular server, i.e. host your own damn social network profile. That would ease the node-to-node bandwidth requirements of a server farm for the service. If you're familiar with it, think Sone on Freenet, but without the distributed hash table and associated latency.

Well, yes, it really matters, since posters having a an identity the defining difference between an imageboard and a social network.

Let's be honest here, there are, in every walk of life, two kinds of people: Those that count and those that do not. You will quickly spot the ones that do, and you will also easily be able to discriminate a "real" message from them from a fake one. And who cares about the others?

[not the AC] i gotta say, your outlook isn't really informative... it's more of a tautology, and worse, you sound as if you have solved some huge issue and the satisifaction i'm sure that brought you, without providing and behaviors, fact, or information for anyone to act on. It is pseudo-intellectual bullshit. We're all guilty of it sometimes, me included.

From what I can tell, because they have no idea about what they're talking about. One of the posts by (apparently) a founder talks about the need to use a central authentication server; the concept of PKI seems foreign to him/her.

PKI, to be effective, requires a central clearing house to validate certificates.

Lets look at the letters...

Public

Key

Infrastructure

I realize many of the more vocal slashdot idiots think that p2p is the cure to everything, yet can not point out a single system that doesn't depend on a central trusted authority. Do yourself a favor and just don't talk about this shit.

Centralized authentication doesn't necessarily mean a single server, or a single data store, or even that all the authentication servers have to be in the same data center. All it means is that there is only one logical authentication authority.

That was my thought precisely. I wonder why we should trust the same anonymous that just recently leaked 90k military email accounts to handle the security of the information. Sure, I bet they know how to secure it, I just question whether they'd bother to. Or worse how we'd know that the information was secure.

By using any number of pre-shared secrets - something you exchange in person to ensure you only friend, you know, real friends, like a passcode, nickname, url, number, etc that is not personally identifiable otherwise. This is a "duh" question. In truth, the ability for massive social networking sites to violate privacy is related to the laziness your statement implies, i.e, "Please here is all the information about me go find my friends for me, please!". Laziness indeed...